New York’s Monumental Flower Inspires an Explosion of Color at Dallas’ Big Nasher Night

Artist and Nasher Prize Laureate Isa Genzken installed a rather monumental flower smack dab in the middle of the world’s most famous concrete jungle.

The 26-foot-tall rose — Rose III (2016) — commands attention on Wall Street in Zuccotti Park, its red-yellow petals barely in bloom atop a thorn-covered stem that has seemingly sprouted straight through the sidewalk.

Genzken’s urban flower played inspiration, it would appear, for the Nasher Prize Gala’s décor, which was nothing short of a gorgeous flower bomb exploding at the Nasher Sculpture Center. Inside the dinner tent and throughout the museum, roses, ranunculus and poppies in the brightest shades of yellow and red overtook the space.

From the tent’s ceiling, blooms in shades of white canopied over dining tables. It was the perfect homage to Genzken, who was unable to attend the gala due to health reasons but was there in spirit nonetheless.

Nasher Sculpture Center director Jeremy Strick spoke to Genzken’s profound and brilliant work, as did chairs John Dayton and Fanchon and Howard Hallam.

The evening proved, per usual, one of the most elegant nights of the year, with a perfectly mixed crowd.

There were artists (last year’s Nasher Prize Laureate Theaster Gates flew in from Chicago for the night); collectors (see: Catherine and Will Rose, Janelle and Alden Pinnell, Sharon and Michael Young, and Deedie Rose); local art-world renegades (from the Pollock Gallery’s Sofia Bastidas to James Cope of And Now Gallery); fashionable types (Nasiba Adilova, Nancy Rogers, Jessica Nowitzki, and Federica Fanari who held court at what we can only call the best-dressed table); and, of course, Nasher luminaries Nancy Nasher and David Haemisegger.